Dust and dirt can reduce the efficiency of solar panels by around 80 percent, so a team of researchers has developed a self-cleaning solar panel.

The technology is already being used for missions to the Moon and Mars, where solar power is extremely important, but the team--which consists of a joint effort between NASA and Malay Mazumder's research team at Boston University--has hopes of bringing the technology down to Earth. A series of sensors on the solar panel is able to detect when the level of dust gets too high, and then clear it away with a dust-repelling electrical charge. Mazumder says that the charge is able to clear away 90 percent of dust.

Solar-panel clogging dust is a big problem because of the sheer size of most solar installations, which makes manual cleaning very impractical. Mazumder and his team hope to have the technology commercially available here on Earth by some point next year.